I’ve had a brilliant life despite being different, says Chernobyl boy Igor

Igor, 26, at home with fiancee Alice, 22 and their children Mia and Leo [TIM CLARKE]

Igor Pavlovets smiles, pops six-month-old Leo on the sofa and heads towards the kitchen in his semi-detached house on a quiet street near Godalming, Surrey.

His fiancee Alice, 22, is just back from her work as a nursery nurse and Igor, 26, has been in sole charge of the children since early morning. It’s a role for which he clearly has natural aptitude. And yet for all their apparent normality this is a remarkable family in many ways.

Following the explosions at the Chernobyl reactor on April 26, 1986, in what was then the Soviet Union, a generation of children was born with disabilities caused by radiation. Igor was one of the first.

He was born on March 3, 1987, with very short legs, turned-out feet and a single arm. He spent the first six years of his life living in a children’s hospital 150 miles from the stricken reactor. It was assumed that his birth mother, unable to cope with his disabilities, had given him up.

I first met Igor 20 years ago when he came to this country for treatment. I wrote a book about him, which has recently been updated, and followed his story as he made a new life here. But no one imagined that he would one day have a family of his own – apart from Igor.

He brims with pride as he introduces me to his children and Alice, whose adoration of him is touchingly apparent.

Twenty years ago Chernobyl boy Igor Pavlovets came to Britain thanks to the generosity of Daily Express readers. Today he has a family of his own and says he couldn’t be happier

Earlier this month she posted a note on Facebook that read: “Happy Valentine’s day to Igor Pavlovets, the love of my life and best dad to our kids love u so much babe xxxx.”

The red roses he gave her are still in a vase on the dining room table. The fact that both Mia and Leo are perfectly healthy children is evidence that their father’s physical differences are due to radiation not genetics.

“I wasn’t worried when Alice was expecting Mia. The doctors knew my background was due only to radiation,” says Igor. “The scans showed they were developing fine and had all their hands and feet.”

But the couple would have gone through with both pregnancies whatever the scans had revealed.

“I’ve had a great life and it’s fine to be different,” insists Igor. “I’ve been bullied on a couple of occasions but once people get to know me that always stops.”

Alice was equally determined to have her babies whatever the scans might have shown.

“If I hadn’t, it would have been like saying I didn’t accept Igor,” she says matter-of-factly. “Yes there would have been more challenges but we have so much support around us that we would have been fine.”

It is only due to Igor’s chance meeting with a British charity director when he was six years old that Alice and Igor met at all. Raised by elderly nurses and supported by a dedicated young doctor, Igor’s future in the former Soviet state of Belarus – where the authorities were keen to hide any evidence of radiation – was bleak.

Had the doctor not lied to the authorities about Igor’s true age he would have been transferred to an adult institution at the age of seven and might not have survived.

But just as time was running out Victor Mizzi, the chairman of Chernobyl Children’s Lifeline, visited the hospital. He was immediately struck by the lively little boy who held out a piece of bread and invited him to share it.

In the past 30 years the charity has brought more than 56,000 children to the UK for four-week respite holidays but Victor wanted to offer Igor the chance of prosthetic treatment which would require a much longer stay.

Twenty years ago when the Daily Express published Igor’s photograph, our readers sent £15,000 in the first week alone. Igor arrived on January 4, 1994, and touched many with his appetite for life.

He was given a racing-car bed in the home of experienced foster parents Barbara and Roy Bennett, started school and eventually made a new life here. To see him today as a grown man and cradling baby Leo to his face using his single muscular arm is deeply moving.

“I can’t remember a lot of my early life,” Igor says. “I might have been in a hospital but I was lucky because I was really loved and cared for.”

From the Daily Express in 1993 just before Igor was flown to Britain [NC]

This no doubt explains why he is able to care instinctively for small children despite spending his formative years in an institution. But his time in the UK awoke a hunger in him.

“As soon as I was here I knew I didn’t want to go back. And if I want something I get it,” he says with a wide smile. As for the prosthetic arm? “It didn’t work for me, it felt weird. I’m grateful for people trying to help me but I’m happy having one arm.”

Several years ago Barbara helped Igor set up a bachelor pad, never daring to hope that he would go on to have a family of his own.

“A couple of relationships had petered out after Igor was introduced to the parents,” says Barbara. But Alice was an entirely different proposition. The couple met at an ice rink and were friends for two years before they moved in together.

“When I first ever saw him I just accepted him immediately,” says Alice. “He is such a character and he makes me laugh so much. One girl I knew said it would never last but we just get on. We don’t argue and we just bounce off each other.”

Igor smiles bashfully. “I was just being myself, acting like the class clown.”

Alice laughs and then becomes more thoughtful. “If you’d been gloomy child people wouldn’t have helped you and you wouldn’t be here now,” she says wisely.

But Igor is not one to dwell on the past. “All I knew was that I was born after an explosion, I grew up in a hospital and then I came here and had a new home with a mum in it,” he says.

Victor believed that more information about his past would help Igor and spent years trying to find out the truth. Finally when the boy was 12, Victor tracked his birth family down at their home in Minsk, Belarus – just a few miles from the children’s hospital.

Far from putting him up for adoption his birth mother Elena Pavlovets had been forced by the authorities to give Igor away at the moment of birth.

She didn’t know whether he had survived but not a day went by when she did not yearn for him.

Finally, when Igor was 16, Elena was able to embrace her son for the first time when they were reunited at Victor’s house in Surrey. Igor also met his younger brother and sister Alexei and Anna with whom he is in touch on Facebook. Elena and his birth father Andrei will meet their first grandchildren in the UK this spring.

Knowing the truth has been reassuring to Igor, just as Victor had hoped. “In my heart I know I was taken away rather than abandoned,” says Igor.

He and his family moved to their pretty two-bedroom council house a year ago. With the help of a friend Igor has worked hard to transform it into a light-filled family home. The garden was an overgrown jungle but Igor has cut back the weeds and bushes.

He is now saving up to make the garden a suitable place for children to play in but money is tight and he is frustrated that he has found it harder than he thought to find employment. A trained mechanic who passed his driving test at the age of 17, he was made redundant a few years ago. For now his focus is on being the best possible father he can be.

“Mia has said on a couple of occasions ‘where is your arm?’ When she’s older I’ll tell her about what happened and why I don’t have an arm. But above all I’ll tell her I’ve had a brilliant life.”

? To find out more about the charity or to buy a copy of the updated book Igor – The Courage Of Chernobyl’s Child by Jane Warren (£5.99), contact Chernobyl Children Life Line, 61 Petworth Road, Haslemere, Surrey GU27 3AX, call 01428 642523 or seechernobylchildlifeline.org